MacStories Weekly: Issue 65

In this issue: Déxter, a collection of apps with photo editing extensions, Marina Epelman’s Home screen, plus the usual Workflow Corner, Weekly Q&A, Links, stickers, app debuts, and recap of MacStories articles.

Every week, we receive dozens of workflow requests and questions about iOS automation, productivity apps, and working from iOS. I want to thank everyone who spends time contacting us, describing their technical problems, and, of course, reading our replies in MacStories Weekly.

For this reason, I also want to assure members that, even if we can’t reply to every single question, we do read them all. When we don’t respond publicly, it’s usually because what a reader is asking isn’t possible to build on iOS or it’s only going to be possible with a future app update we can’t discuss yet. We need to balance the amount of unfulfilled requests we publish every Friday – after all, the majority of readers expect us to solve problems and describe solutions, not apologize for things that iOS doesn’t support yet.

We’re going to try our best to respond to as many questions as possible going forward. As usual, if you have any feedback on MacStories Weekly, feel free to get in touch with us. Thanks again for your support, and enjoy this week’s issue of MacStories Weekly.

– Federico

MACSTORIES RECOMMENDS

Great apps, accessories, gear, and media recommended by the MacStories team.

Déxter

Federico

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up Pokémon Sun again and started playing where I left off in early December. While most of my friends with iOS devices are obsessed with Pokémon GO, I prefer the series’ traditional games for Nintendo consoles, and I find the latest generation of Pokémon games to be excellent evolutions (no pun intended) of the decade-long franchise. Whether you’ve been playing Pokémon since Generation 1 (raises hand) or if you’re new to the series, Sun and Moon succeed in refreshing old gameplay elements and introducing brand new ideas and mechanics.

What a lot of people don’t know is that Pokémon is a surprisingly deep RPG. And by deep, I mean you’ll need a guide or some serious online resources to understand advance topics such as competitive battle teams, EV training, Pokémon natures and abilities, breeding, and more. There is an entire meta-game to Pokémon that is well hidden from the main storyline, but which you can spend years fiddling with and perfecting. And, of course, your trusted companion for collecting Pokémon and keeping an eye on evolutions is the Pokédex.

But here’s the thing: the in-game Pokédex, even in Sun and Moon, is mostly limited to basic Pokémon details and, of course, it’s only available on your Nintendo 3DS, which requires to carry the console around even if, say, you’re at work and suddenly want to know when Mudbray evolves into Mudsdale (it happens to the best of us). This is why I’ve been using Déxter for iPhone, a free app developed by Chris Pritchard, for all my Pokémon needs on iOS. Déxter is a complete Pokédex and team-building tool that supports every generation of Pokémon (from I to VII) and that lets you view creature information such as base stats and movesets, plan teams, and even compare two Pokémon to see how they stack up against each other. For each Pokémon, you can view the official Pokédex entry, see animated 3D sprites (including Shiny ones), and consult base stats. However, you can also check the evolution tree and complete moveset, see which moves can be learned via TMs and eggs, and read the locations where a Pokémon can be captured across all generations of games (locations for gen. VII are still being added).

There are complete lists for moves, abilities, natures, and items, too, with a handy search feature to look for specific entries in the app. And if, like me, you sometimes struggle to remember how each Pokémon type affects one another, there’s a Type Checker page where you can see what is Super Effective or has reduced damage in battles.

If you can think of something you’d like to know about Pokémon games, there’s a high probability that Dexter will have the answer. Déxter also happens to have a nice design and options to mark pages as favorites for quick access. And if Déxter doesn’t have what you’re looking for, you will find embedded links to Serebii and Bulbapedia – two of the premier websites for committed Pokémon trainers.

Here’s what is truly surprising, though: Déxter is completely free with no ads or In-App Purchases. According to the developer, he just loves Pokémon and likes making apps, so he released Déxter for free on the App Store and continues to maintain it to this day. I hope that Pritchard will consider adding a tip jar or other means to directly support the development going forward. Déxter is the kind of app that Nintendo should have made years ago and instead is the result of an indie developer’s commitment and passion.

If you enjoy Pokémon games on the Nintendo 3DS and have an iPhone, I can’t recommend Déxter enough.

MACSTORIES COLLECTIONS

iOS Apps with Editing Extensions in Photos

Ryan

Annotable

Annotable is a fantastic image editor with a number of helpful tools including a magnification loupe, a tool to pixelate sensitive information, and simpler options that add text, arrows, or other shapes to an image. It’s all extremely simple and easy to use. My favorite part about the app, though, is that I never have to open it. All of its tools can be used from within Apple’s Photos app, either by invoking Annotable’s action extension or photo editing extension.

Colordrop

Colordrop is another app that enables its full feature set to be used within Photos via an action extension. In this case, that full feature set is extremely limited, as Colordrop exists solely for the purpose of extracting colors from images. Using the action extension, Colordrop extracts a color’s hex code and RGB levels. You can view that data right within the extension, but if you’d like to save it, there’s a ‘Save to Colordrop’ button to preserve it within the app for future reference.

Metapho

Metapho allows you to view and edit an image’s metadata. Data that can be viewed through the photo editing extension includes the image’s date, file type, dimensions, file size, camera it was taken on, and location. The extension offers two actions: removing all metadata for privacy, or changing the location data. The only option from the full app that’s missing from the extension is the ability to edit the image’s date, so the vast majority of what you might need can be done from within Photos.

Retype

Retype is an app that makes it easy to add great looking typography to any photo. I use it all the time in my day job to create graphics to share on social media. Retype comes with an assortment of typographical styles you can overlay on a photo. Just pick a style, type your text, then you can alter the size or color of the text very easily. All of this can be done through the app’s photo editing extension. The only thing you miss out on when using the extension is the group of stock images Retype provides; if you’re editing your own photo, though, there’s no need to open the app.

Pixelmator

Pixelmator is far too powerful an app to cram all of its tools into a photo editing extension, so its developers focused on providing a few select options that can quickly and easily enhance your image. You can do things like add blur or sharpen an image, or overlay a filter to create a vintage or black and white look. Other editing options include a kaleidoscope effect, and being able to bring a certain part of the image into focus while blurring everything else. There’s a wide number of tools, and behind many of them are some sub-options, so I recommend playing around with the extension to see what all it has to offer.

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Shortcuts Essentials

Putting iPad Pro and iPhone Plus Screenshots into Device Frames (Early 2017)

Federico

For this week’s Workflow Essentials column, I wanted to follow-up on an image editing workflow I first published on MacStories in March 2016. These are two short and simple workflows, but they’re saving me a lot of time every week, and I think they could be useful for other writers or developers who share screenshots every day.

Last year, I explained how we could use Workflow’s ‘Overlay Image’ action to select an iPad Pro or iPhone screenshot from the device library and put it inside one of Apple’s official iOS product images. Apple has since released the iPhone 7 and I wanted to come up with an updated and simplified version of the workflow, so I asked my girlfriend to download Apple’s latest templates and prepare them for Workflow automation.

Of course, because she knows what she’s doing, it only took her a couple of minutes to isolate the relevant layers from Apple’s templates and give me the coordinates to overlay a screenshot in Workflow.

Here’s what you will need to do before running the workflows:

Download: iPad Pro 12.9-inch landscape template image;
Download: iPhone 7 Plus portrait template image;
Install the iPad Pro screenshot workflow;
Install the iPhone Plus screenshot workflow;
Place both template images somewhere in your Dropbox account;
Enter the path to both images in the ‘Get Files from Dropbox’ action in Workflow.

Unlike last year’s workflows that featured a variety of possible image combinations for different device orientations, I kept this year’s update purposefully simple so you can figure out how to come up with your own flavor. As long as you select a screenshot taken on an iPhone Plus or 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the workflow will overlay the image on top of Silvia’s modified Apple device template, and you will end up with images that look like this:

Using this foundation, you will be able to remix my workflow any way you’d like to: for instance, you could use a Repeat block and ‘Combine Images’ to place multiple iPhones side-by-side; you could swap the files in last year’s workflow to automatically place an iPhone next to an iPad and scale it proportionally; or, you could flip an iPhone’s template sideways with ‘Rotate Image’, invert the coordinates, and overlay a landscape screenshot. As usual when it comes to Workflow, the choice is yours.

Submit a Shortcut Request

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Member Requests

Question: I just started using your Toggl workflows after listening to you as well as Myke and CGP Grey. I like them so far but there is a problem I’m encountering where projects that I have deleted still show up in Workflow. They don’t show up in the web version or the Timer app. Have you encountered this? It is not a functional problem but quite a visually annoying one. (Rodrigo Rivero , @rodrigoriveroc)

Federico

That was a possibility I didn’t consider when I was putting together my Toggl workflows. I don’t know if it can be considered a bug or not, but if you delete a project from the Toggl web app without archiving it first, the Toggl API will still report it as active, and it’ll show up in the list of your projects fetched by Workflow.

The good news, however, is that deleted projects have an additional parameter exposed in the API that tells us if they’ve been deleted by the user. The flag we’re looking for is server_deleted_at, which indicates if a project was previously deleted on the Toggl website. After discovering this, I updated my Prepare Toggl Template workflow to not include deleted projects in the list that asks you to pick a project to set up a new timer (a method I detailed two weeks ago here).

Under the hood, I only had to extract a value from each project and, inside a Repeat block, check if the flag was present with a combination of Count Items and a conditional block. You can apply this routine to other Toggl workflows to add the same check for deleted projects.

You can get the updated workflow here.

Question: I was very excited to see your smart Toggl timers that leverage Workflow’s ability to interact with web APIs and that, I believe, have beaten most of the time tracking apps I’ve tried over the past five years. The updated version has been an even bigger surprise, but it comes up with an issue: I have to keep a long list of timer workflows.

In my case, I track my reading time for books, magazines, etc., and I set a timer for each book. But, normally, I don’t finish books one by one – I keep several at hand at the same time. Thus with this new method I have to keep too many independent timers in the workflow widget.

Choosing from a timer list wouldn’t be a big hassle to me. It would be great to have a “master” workflow that calls other timer workflows – only I don’t know if this is doable. (Philip Wang, @rfphilip)

Federico

This can be achieved by using the Workflow URL scheme inside Workflow itself.

The “trick” here is to manually assemble a list of workflow names first. Because Workflow has a URL scheme that can be used to a call a specific workflow by name and run it, we can pick the workflow in an interactive List and then encode it for the URL scheme.

Using a Dictionary to create a list in Workflow.

The best way to do this, in my opinion, is with a Dictionary filled with Text items: on the left side of each item, you can enter any name (key) you want – this can be a different title than the actual name of a workflow, such as an emoji, for example. On the right side of the dictionary item (the value field) you’ll have to enter the exact name of the workflow you want to run. Repeat this process for as many workflows as you want – set up a friendly title, plus the name of the workflow to be triggered.

The List action will do the rest: you’ll be able to pick a workflow from a list, which will output the value of the dictionary to a ‘URL Encode’ action. This allows the Workflow URL scheme in the URL action to pick up the name of the workflow to run and launch it. If you’re running the workflow inside the app, you’ll jump from one workflow to another; when run from the widget, you’ll also be taken to the Workflow app upon launching the URL scheme.

This isn’t the most elegant solution (I wish the widget could execute a referenced workflow in the background without launching the app), but it should get the job done for what you’re looking to build.

You can get the workflow here.

Question: I want to be able to use the Workflow share extension to take an input (image, text, URL) and post it to a Slack channel with “/remind” appended and the option to add text after “/remind” so I can specify when I want Slack to remind me (Ben, @btpohl)

Federico

I first detailed my workflow to send Slack reminders (and how to authenticate with the Slack API) in Issue 53 of MacStories Weekly. You should go back and read how to generate a token for your Slack account before setting up the workflow.

To turn the workflow into an action extension, I had to make a minor modification to it. Instead of presenting a text field to ask you to type some text for the reminder, the workflow now saves whatever is captured by the action extension as a variable; the variable is then used for the reminder that will be sent by Slackbot to a team member you previously selected from a list. Everything else in the workflow is the same as the original version.

You can get the workflow here.

Question: I love to listen podcasts in Overcast when I’m out for a walk, and especially in the Connected podcast there are always links that I’d like to check later, when I arrive home. Is there any way to export the show notes to Apple Notes including links? (Jospe, @soyjospe)

Federico

Unfortunately, this mostly comes down to Apple’s implementation of rich text on iOS. When you select text in Overcast’s show notes and tap the Share button in the copy & paste menu, links are not exposed to the system. iOS only sees plain text with no formatting, which means we have no links to extract from that text. Unless Marco Arment adds support for manually exporting rich text from Overcast’s episode pages, there’s nothing we can automate here.

Question: I’d love to have a workflow to extract ZIPs or archives from emails received in Airmail (or other email clients if applicable) as I’m trying to work with iOS more and more but my job requires that I deal with zips on a heavy basis. If there’s a neat workflow that can also compress multiple files from iCloud Drive, then that’d also be great. (Karl Koch, @_kejk)

Federico

The first part of the question doesn’t require Workflow. You can install a file manager like the great (and free) Documents by Readdle to send ZIP files from Airmail messages to it. In Airmail, tap on the attachment, then hit the share icon, and choose ‘Copy to Documents’. This will send the .zip archive to Documents, where you can extract it and work with its files.

(If you really want to use Workflow for this, you can enable a workflow as an action extension with ‘Extract Archive’ as the first action. You’ll end up with a list of files to work with separately – thus why I recommend a file manager.)

The second question is possible with Workflow, although with a small compromise. iCloud Drive’s document picker can’t select multiple files at once (this is one of the worst limitations of iOS), so we have to “fake” our way around picking multiple files in a row. We can do this by manually entering the number of files we need to pick. In the first ‘Ask for Input’ action, you’ll be asked to type a number of files to pick from iCloud Drive; then, a repeat block will loop x number of times, asking you to pick a file each time.

After the repeat block is done, all the files will be compressed in a single .zip archive (with a name you can type). The .zip archive will then be passed to the share sheet so you can save it elsewhere with extensions.

You can get the workflow here.

Submit a Workflow Request

Submit a Shortcut Request

WEEKLY Q&A

Your weekly correspondence with the MacStories team.

Question: I know you’ve been using workflows and the web API to track your time, and now you have also persuaded Grey and Myke to do so as well, so I’m considering taking the plunge and trying this for myself. What would you say has been the biggest benefit for you thanks to time tracking? (Hundte, @HBiede)

Federico

Being able to more accurately estimate how long any task is going to take. I used to have these unrealistic estimates in my mind about how long, for instance, editing an issue of MacStories Weekly would take every week. Now, after months of time tracking and analyzing average logged times, I know that it usually takes me 3-4 hours on Thursday to edit a complete issue. This also applies to bigger stories for the site, administrative tasks, and other activities that I wasn’t tracking before. Thanks to Toggl (and time tracking in general), I can better organize my week and, as a result, get more done while freeing up blocks of time elsewhere.

Question: I liked the workflow Federico posted to automatically log meetings in Toggl. I live half of my (working) life in meetings and I often forget to log them. Unfortunately, most of my calendar is in Office 365, so I cannot directly connect it with Google Calendar and Toggl, but I was wondering if the same result can be achieved with a Workflow to “copy” all events for the week in a (non-synced and non-visualized) Google Calendar? Any better idea? (Simone Rizzo, @simonerizzo)

Federico

I’ve tried workflows to iterate over an entire calendar in the past, and I don’t recommend them – there’s too much complexity involved, and it’s hard to account for new events you may have modified or added during the week.

Fortunately, Zapier has native support for Office 365 event triggers, which would allow you to replicate my Google Calendar -> Toggl workflow by swapping one action. You can read more about Office 365 on Zapier here.

Question: Hi team, I was wondering how a move from one cloud service to another would work. Now, still having a MacBook Air, I would download the files from the old cloud service to the computer and then upload them again to the new cloud service. How would this task be solved by a future me once I go iOS-only (after the new iPad Pros will be released)? (Roland)

Federico

Unless Apple updates the iPad’s software to be able to process multiple files at once, you’d be forced to move one file at a time between two apps using extensions. That’s not an ideal solution, and I wouldn’t recommend it because it’d be a waste of time. The iPad desperately needs revamped file management capabilities, which will hopefully come in the next major version of iOS.

Question: My friend’s current workflow is receiving PDFs by email, printing them, marking up the printed copy with his comments, and returning the result as a fax. He hopes to move that to using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to annotate the PDF and then email it back. Can you recommend an iOS app that does this one thing well? I use Documents by Readdle (although not with an iPad Pro), but in his case simplicity and easy discoverability of the features will be paramount. He doesn’t need a file manager, and he’s of an age (as am I, for that matter) to be annoyed by unnecessary complexity. (William Lisowski)

John

I recommend GoodNotes. It’s an app that can be used for taking handwritten notes with the Apple Pencil, but I’ve found it to be an excellent choice for marking up PDFs too. I often use it to edit the stories of my MacStories’ colleagues.

When you receive a PDF by email, open it in preview mode inside Apple Mail or another iOS email app like Airmail and tap the share button. If you have GoodNotes installed and its extension activated, there will be a share extension called ‘Import with GoodNotes.’ Tap that to send a copy of the PDF to GoodNotes. You will be presented with options to import the PDF at the top or bottom of the current document, or ‘Create New Document.’ If you intend to send your markup to someone when you are finished with it, I suggest picking ‘Create New Document.’

After the PDF is imported, you can use the Apple Pencil to mark it up as you see fit. GoodNotes lets you change the ink color and line width of your markup to something you like. When you’re finished, tap the three-dot button in the upper right hand corner of the screen and choose ‘Export.’ You can export the current page or the whole document as a PDF, GoodNotes document, or image. Choose PDF and make sure the ‘Export Annotations’ switch is turned on. Tap ‘Export’ again, and you’ll see several choices for saving the file or sending it by email or using ‘External Apps’ which opens the system share sheet with whatever extensions you have available. Choose email to attach the document to a new message and send it to whomever you’d like.

Submit your own question

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

Jason Amanda takes an in-depth look at the challenges of UX design in the context of voice-activated assistants like Siri and Alexa.

Game Weatherhead explains on Macdrifter how he uses Workflow to access his most-used DEVONthink documents and folders on iOS.

Plex has launched a new Amazon Echo integration to let you ask Alexa to play media from your Plex library.

LG will release an updated version of their UltraFine USB-C 5K display with a fix for WiFi interferences.

TwelveSouth has launched MagicBridge, an accessory to hold the Apple Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad together.

Jason Snell on the possibility of a hybrid ARM/Intel Mac following a Bloomberg report from earlier this week.

Supertop, makers of Castro, think iOS 10.3’s upcoming in-app review prompts could be implemented differently.

Chinese holiday-themed emoji have been added as candidates for post-2017 Unicode updates. These include firecracker, mooncake, and red envelope.

New screenshots of Oceanhorn 2, which will be powered by Unreal Engine 4 and will be released on iOS too.

The Mac app icon design workflow of Bjango’s Marc Edwards.

And finally, John Bozinov on how he shot pictures of penguins in Antarctica with an iPhone 7 Plus. That’s a lot of penguins.

THE ALBUM

We love stickers in iMessage, and here we'll share some of our favorites.

John

Foodie Food Pun Hotdog Stickers and Emojis

That name is a mouthful. Maybe that’s the point. These are hot dog stickers after all. This colorful, crazy-eyed hot dog guy is a great addition to any conversation.

Money

Want to pretend you’re a high-roller? Or maybe your roommate owes you a pile of dough for the rent. Either way, these animated money stickers will come in handy.

Facesticks

Decorating photos is a great way to torment your friends. Facesticks is a solid collection of eyes, glasses, hair, hats, and even a few random objects like a sandwich.

Excited Chicken

This animated chicken has undeniable flair. Pro tip: pair the butt shaking chicken sticker with dancing bacon guy from the Rag Tag Classic sticker pack.

Be Mine: Valentine’s Day Heart Stickers

Nothing says ‘I love you’ like ‘Fax Me,’ right? Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and I have to admit, I’d rather send these stickers than those awful tasting heart candies with messages printed on them.

Hotdog Flavour Bubblegum

What these stickers have to do with hotdogs and bubblegum is beyond me, but these pink and black stickers of silly creatures and other things are fun nonetheless.

Superhero Hamster

What if hamsters were super heroes? Well, they certainly would be cute like these little animated guys.

Fat Unicorn

This unicorn should rethink his diet. Poor fat unicorn is featured in this sticker pack in a variety of contexts and expressions, such as surprise, love, and the ever-needed coffee. It’s funny because unicorns aren’t usually fat.

Happy Things

Aaron is a freelance illustration graduate who created a delightful sticker pack of animals, food, and things that are happy. From a sloth hugging his coffee cup to a hot dog sleeping between its buns, this pack is going to make an impression.

Crazy Sharks

As the name implies, these are humanized sharks with exaggerated reactions. For instance, there’s an angry shark throwing a small fish on the floor and a pensive shark that likely just had a million-dollar idea. Mildly upsetting, weird, and abundantly funny.

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

Federico

Email

The latest version of Easilydo’s polished email client for iOS has added support for Touch ID, 3D Touch quick actions on the Home screen, and the ability to save passes and tickets to Wallet. You can also select multiple images to attach to a message and notifications can be expanded to reveal more than two actions on iOS 10.

John

linq

Readers of my weekly Game Day feature know I love puzzle games. linq is an excellent example of the kind of puzzle games I like. The gameplay is simple, but the puzzles go from a handful of easy tutorial puzzles to mind benders quickly.

linq is a series of octagonal spots on the screen linked by lines. Some spots are filled in and others aren’t. The goal of the game is to trace a path that starts with a filled-in octagon and ends on one. Along the way, you cannot pass over the same spot twice. There are 60 levels and a spacey electronic soundtrack that makes linq a relaxing diversion.

Calendar for Google Calendar

Calendars on the Apple TV struck me as odd initially, but it’s not unusual for my wife and me to talk about what’s going on the next day while we’re watching something in the evening on our Apple TV. With Calendar for Google Calendar, checking your calendar is now possible on the Apple TV. The design is easy to read on a TV and you can even add events using the Siri Remote, which is cool.

Serial Box Publishing

Serial Box Publishing is a unique approach to fiction on mobile. Stories are published as periodic serials that are available to read as text in Serial Box’s app or as audiobooks. With a recent update, Serial has added a sample button to give users a taste of a story before committing to purchase it. Stories can be purchased as individual episodes or at a discount with a season pass.

HOME SCREENS

Friends of MacStories share their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch Home screens.

Marina Epelman

Professional: homepage and @M_Epelman; Personal: @marinaepelman. Associate Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor*.*

My current hardware is a silver iPhone SE. I’ve owned the 6, and then the 6S, but they were really too much for my small hand and the ergonomics were all wrong – my thumb was constantly sore (is “thumbdinitis” a word?). So, as soon as the SE came out, I jumped at the opportunity. My thumb hurts no more, although I had to “upgrade” my eyeglasses to bifocals, and I do miss 3D Touch capabilities.

On the Lock screen is my dachshund Peggy.

There are many, many apps on my phone, and most of them are called up by search. The ones that reside on my Home screen are there either because I want to be able to open them very quickly, or because their badges give me information I want to be aware of, and don’t want to miss or forget because the app is on a second screen or in a folder. It is quite possible that in the future some of this functionality will be replaced by widgets in Today view, but not yet.

In the top row are some native apps I use often enough to justify their position on the Home screen.

In the second row are Tweetbot, Phone, and Messages – my means of communication. I have Twitter elsewhere on the phone, but only use it when I need some specific feature that is not implemented in Tweetbot, which otherwise is my favorite by miles and miles and miles. The row is rounded out by NYTimes, for the news junkie that I am (many more news apps are in the back!).

The third row is my audio entertainment. Overcast is my podcast app, due in part to its Smart Speed feature (remember – news junkie!). I keep “unfinished episode number” badge on in part to make fun of myself, to myself. Clearly, I have a problem. I do. Don’t you? 'Course you do!

Next are Apple Music and Spotify – I subscribe to both right now, since each gives me something unique. I like the lyrics view and curated playlists on the former, and I like automatic suggestions of the latter. To my great delight, Spotify’s two Daily Mix playlists quickly evolved to contain one that is filled with American and British tracks, and the other – with Russian ones. Moreover, unlike Apple Music, Spotify seems to realize that “Russian” is a language, not a genre, and I have specific taste in songs that happen to have Russian lyrics. Bravo! (Which, incidentally, is the name of a Russian rockabilly band that got its start in the early 80’s, much to the chagrin of the authorities.) My house has several Sonos speakers, controlled by the last app in this row (and, as of a few months ago, accessible directly from Spotify as well – I really wish Apple Music would follow suit… hey, and maybe we can convince Marco Arment to make Overcast web service compatible with Sonos, too!).

In the next row are my attempts to get organized – something that still keeps evolving. Currently, I use 2Do and OmniFocus to keep track of deadlines – personal and work-related, respectively, but I don’t really use either of them to flesh out projects or checklists. Right now, I am experimenting with using Trello to give more of a visual layout to the many balls I need to keep in the air at work, since many of them don’t have frequent deadlines attached to them. Additionally, I started experimenting with NotePlan a few weeks ago, when I was invited to join the beta of the iOS companion of its Mac app – my hope is that it will help me map out each day a little better. It’s a clever app — a combination of calendar, Markdown notes, and a Markdown-based daily task list — and I recommend that you check it out to see if it suits you.

The bottom row contains a few other “quick access” apps that I am sure MacStories’ readers would recognize. These sometimes get cycled in and out when I travel, or when spring comes around and MLB.com At Bat becomes urgently important to me. (Let’s Go Red Sox! Oh, and Go, Cubs, Go!, too!)

My dock has the 4 apps I don’t want to be without even when I am on a different screen. 1Password, Safari, and Spark mail app by Readdle are familiar to the readers (the banners on Readdle’s app icons indicate “early access” versions). I want to highlight Week Calendar. In the last couple of years I noticed an interesting phenomenon – I have multiple apps with roughly the same functionality installed on my phone. Case in point: I like Fantastical’s Today widget, I like Apple’s native Calendar on my Watch, but to actually work with on the iPhone, Week Calendar is an absolute must for me. It’s an app with a ton of options for how to display and enter your calendar information, but what’s most important to me is that they have the best week view of any iPhone calendar app.

Somehow, they manage to cram an insane amount of information onto the screen (they’ve been around since 2010 – the era of 3.5" screens – so they really do know how to nail information density). Since I teach in a university, my schedules get crazy sometimes, but parts of them follow a weekly pattern, so a weekly view with a clear identification of “free” blocks of time is very important. Their “mini-month” view is another favorite of mine.

If you would indulge me, I’d also like to show off my iPad Home screen (as well as another picture of Peggy, and a photo of an active crater in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park).

This is a 12.9" iPad Pro, and I often use it for work-related activities (don’t worry, the many, many video streaming apps are in the back). I don’t do much writing on iOS (it has to do with using LaTeX typesetting system, and my propensity to stare at 3–4 open windows on a 29" ultra-wide screen while doing so), but the Pro’s size and Pencil make it perfect for reading and marking up PDF files. I even got the silver version specifically because white bezels look like margins of a letter-sized piece of paper, to complete the effect.

Not surprisingly, you’ll see many apps that support my PDF habit: Adobe Acrobat, which is quite good, actually, allows you to mark up any PDF files in Dropbox “live”; LiquidText, which lets you summarize and annotate your documents in some really innovative ways; and Documents – the champion of file organization on iOS. Not visible on this screen is PDF Expert, because I mostly use it as a plugin within Documents, but it deserves its own mention. In particular, it allows you to add markup to PDF files in a way that goes beyond highlighting and adding notes. Once you enter markup mode, you can edit the text of your PDF file – which is pretty awesome, but not unique among sophisticated PDF managers. Once you exit this mode, however, you are returned to the original document, and your corrections are shown as markup: delete this sentence here (shown as a red line through the text), insert this word there (a blue insertion point with a pop-up), replace “duel” with “dual” (a combination of the red and the blue), and so on.

You may ask, why can’t I be content with just editing the PDF file? The answer is two-fold: first of all, nearly all PDF files that my colleagues and I produce are created by typesetting a LaTeX source; thus, we don’t actually edit a PDF file, but rather indicate what changes should be made to the source. Moreover, many of the files I am marking up are drafts of documents written by students – my task here is not just to improve or correct the document, but to show them what changes I suggest that they make to work on their writing. Trust me, it’s a huge deal to me! It used to be something that only Acrobat Pro on PCs and Macs allowed you to do, and I was stunned when Readdle was able to introduce this capability into PDF Expert for iOS a few years ago. I really hope that they bring this feature to the Mac version as well.

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